LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME.

Timaru Herald, Volume LI, Issue 4885, 7 July 1890, Page 4

LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME.

Canon Liddon, discoursing in St. Paul's Cathedral recently, on ihe public virtues in Ancient Rome, said everything outward at Home, the world's centre, was on a splendid scale. The public buildings, tho temples, the baths, the public shows, everything connected with the army, everything connected with the machinery and tho apparatus of - government, was calculated to impress, and even to awe, the imagination ; but there was one overshadowing defect in that great worM which would have come home with especial force to the minds of the class from which the rank and file of tho Boman forces were chiefly recruited—it was a world without love ; it was a world full of want and suffering, and the whole of tho great social and political machine went round and round without taking any account of this. It would bo easy be; slid, to point ti> a few facts which might at first sight appear to traverse this severe judgment. Liberality was indeed a sort of virtue which bad to bo practised, whether he liked it or not, by every public man in Rome, from the Emperor downwards. Every public man had to make over to the public in same shape or other, a certain part of 'his income, whether in gifts to his native city or to the olub or society to which he belonged, over and above gifts to his friends and relatives.. He.- moat build a theatre, or an aqueduct, or a fountain, or a temple ; he must make a new road, he must repair the city walls, he must give corn, wine, oil to be distributed among the citizens ; he mutt endow publio baths ; he mast endow a public library. Whea, for instance, Julius Caesar triumphed the people were feasted in the streets at 22,000 table*, and the costliest wines of Southern Italy and of the Greek Archipelago woresaid to have run in., rivers. .. But alt this was not the outcome of love ; they were forms of expenditure which were selfish. The main' object of BUch expenditure was to secure that sort of popularity which means political' power. It was repaid, if not in kind.yet substantially. It had no more to do with charity, which loves its object for his own sake and not for the sake of what can be got out of him, than any other kind of outlay of capital with a view to a calculated return has to do with it. In order to do real good the eye must rest not on what is prudent in, or on what is expected of, the givor, hue on what is needed in the recipient. Nothing was done systematically in the old world for classes or individuals who coald make no return. There was no sort of care for widows or for orphans, there were no hospitals, there was no public provision for those who were not citiiens, j atid ••therefore had no influence, there was' no consideration, it was. little enough to say ] tbii/for the immense class of slaves. Slaves were mere property to be bought and sold and punished, and, at one time, killed at the discretion of their masters. All this was in harmony with the principle laid down by great teachers of the ancient world such as Plato and Aristotle. In Plato's ideal state the poor havo no place, beggars are expelled or left-to die. In Aristotle's account of the virtues, tho znost prominent, from a Christian point of view, is generosity, but on examiou tion generosity turns out to be a prudential mean between avarice and extravagance.